For decades a thunderous roar rose from the bowels of IBM keyboards like the animus of angry and forgotten gods. These keyboards have fallen silent of late, due only to incompatibility with newer hardware. Now, Model Ms have been given a reprieve from landfills or recycling centers because of the work of [wulax] of geekhack and his Model M Bluetooth controller board.
The team a Zunkworks wanted to build a device for people who can’t normally use a keyboard and mouse. The Bluetooth Morse code keyboard is what they came up with. This build gives the user full control over the keyboard and mouse using a single button or a sip & puff interface.
Continue reading “Bluetooth Morse Code Keyboard For The Disabled”
The iWallet is a slick little device if you’ve got a big wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket. The $600 price tag was a little much for [cmw] to swallow, so he bought a water damaged iWallet on eBay with hopes of repairing it. Once took a close look, he knew that repairing it was a lost cause, so he decided to hack it instead.
He pulled out most of the wallet’s electronics save for the motor that opens the device, and replaced the damaged parts with his own. He installed an Arduino pro as well as a Bluetooth module, powering the pair with a small rechargeable LiPo battery. The iWallet’s fingerprint reader was then replaced with a series of LEDs that show the device’s Bluetooth connectivity status.
[cmw] can now connect his wallet to his phone, issuing unlock commands via Bluetooth. If you don’t want to fork out the cash, his version is nearly as good as the real thing.
Continue reading to see a quick video of [cmw’s] iWallet hack in action.
[Peter Brinkman] is working on a circuit that makes it easy to interface MIDI and Bluetooth devices. His target hardware has been a MIDI compatible keyboard and an Android phone. He was inspired to tip us off about the project after reading about yesterday’s Bluescripts project.
We’ve embedded two demo videos after the break. They show [Peter] first using this hardware to receive MIDI signals from a keyboard on his Android phone, and then he demonstrates using the phone and an on-screen musical keyboard to transmit data back to a MIDI device which generates the intended sounds.
It’s an interesting project and he’s headed down the kit-production path right now. You’ll want to browse all of his recent posts, but we especially liked reading his thoughts about simplifying the circuitry. He originally had two separate voltages running in the circuit with a level converter for data signals. After some re-conceptualization he ditched several components and improved the functionality a bit.
Continue reading “Turn Any Bluetooth Device Into A MIDI Controller”
Here’s a way to gain control of your projects using an Android device. Bluescripts is a free app available in the Android market that makes it a bit easier to make interfaces to send customizable messages. If you have a Bluetooth receiver in your project, connecting to it is as easy as putting the MAC address into an XML file on the Android device. Each tag in that file has a name, as well as the address of the target and the message that should be sent. On the receiving end, you just need to make sure your project hardware is ready to receive an ASCII message and act based on what comes through.
Check out the demonstration video after the break. Perhaps it’s not as cool as you could do if you were writing your own Android program, but we can’t think of anything we’ve seen that makes an Android interface this quick and easy.
Continue reading “Bluescripts Makes Bluetooth Control From Android A Bit Easier”
Instructables user [tcollinsworth] is a big fan of his Android smart phone. He practically carries it with him everywhere, so he figured it would be cool to integrate as many of his home electronics with the phone as possible. His garage door openers seemed like easy enough targets, and while he was in the garage, he decided to hack his car’s remote starter as well.
He put together a small circuit that allows him to trigger any device via an application called Daisy On/Off, made specifically for the Bluetooth board he selected. One set of pins were wired to the garage door opener’s terminals, and the other to his remote start key fob. Once he had everything connected up, he packaged his components in a project box courtesy of his MakerBot. With that finished, he put together a simple interface in the Daisy application which can start his car or open the garage with a single button press.
It should be mentioned that [tcollinsworth] works for Daisy, so the reasoning behind his choice of components and Android applications is an obvious one. That said, schematics for the Daisy Bluetooth board are available online and the device can be controlled using BlueTerm, so you can feel free to roll your own implementation if you wish.
Our only nagging thought is that the system should probably include a feedback circuit that relays messages to the phone, indicating that the door is indeed open and that the car has been started. Pocket dialing your car to start without opening the garage first would definitely be a bad thing.
Check out the video below to see the system in action.
Continue reading “Use Bluetooth To Open Your Garage And Start Your Car Remotely”
We remember when retro-gaming required a lot of equipment and a serious time commitment to put together a gaming interface. [Scooter2084] proves that we’ve come a long way with this gaming controller built to complement Android hardware.
It’s not immediately obvious from the image above, but the controller itself looks just like Andy the Android. His head is tilted upward and acts as the tablet stand, while his torso hosts the controls. We don’t the arms and legs have a functional use but they are necessary to complete the look.
Traditionally arcade controls have used a hacked gamepad, or dedicated hardware like the MAME cabinets that use iPac control boards. But this rendition interfaces the joystick and four buttons using an Arduino. A Bluetooth shield lets you control the Android device wirelessly, and opens up the possibility to use this as a controller for laptop-based emulators and the like. Don’t miss the video after the break.
Continue reading “Androcade Is A Controller And Stand In One”
